A. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a product development and assessment system and method. Specifically the invention is directed to a method, system, and program product for conducting network-based surveys of respondents (such as prospective or existing consumers or customers) using continuous metric scales; developing a framework within which respondents rate new or existing products, services or advertisements; translation of the survey results into a readily understandable score, and automatic interpretation and reporting of the data and score in plain English.
B. Background
Traditionally, product and service development involves evaluation of customer acceptance. During economic slowdowns, companies typically have fewer resources to devote to time and cost intensive customer studies. A rapid, reliable and inexpensive system for getting large scale consumer evaluations of new product concepts, and developing these concepts into full implementation and execution would be desirable.
Furthermore, both venture capitalists and investors capitalized Internet start-ups at historic levels—even though the start-ups often had little marketplace experience, no profits, and no measure of whether customers would adopt their product or service over the long run. The bottom dropped out of this market. Some of the companies were popular, but did not have profit models to sustain them. Other companies failed because customers were dissatisfied with either the product or the execution of the product, i.e., how easy or charming was the experience of doing business on-line. One factor leading to the funding debacle was that venture capitalists did not have the tools to assess whether consumers would try, like, and adopt the new electronic product or service. The new companies focused their capital on building expensive systems, databases, communications systems, applications and even factories and advertising before they knew whether customers really wanted the product or service as the company planned to deliver it.
Investors typically rely on business plans to determine whether or not to invest. Business plans, however, typically lack a reliable objective indicator of: whether the target customer wants the idea; whether, if consumers try it, it delivers what the idea promises; and whether the customer perceives that the electronic product or service is an effortless, charming experience that works at the customer's speed and is an improvement over the customer's old way of acquiring the product or service.
Today, many companies use focus groups to estimate customer response to new concepts, products, and advertisements. Focus groups can identify issues, anecdotes and customer language. The results, however, are often narrow. Focus group results, moreover, can readily be manipulated by the subjective nature of the questions and the moderator's position on the product, service, or advertisement. Focus groups have their use, but focus groups cannot deliver rigorous quantitative and qualitative evaluation and diagnosis of the concept, product, and advertisement.
Those skilled in the art appreciate that the most reliable indicator of the potential acceptance of a product is “rank order data.” Rank order data is a measurement of the customer's view on the relative appeal of the new product concept compared to the customer's current product. Unfortunately, obtaining valid and reliable rank order data is often difficult, costly and time-consuming. It is difficult because there is often no current method of having customers identify their preferences in an objective manner. Even if there were a current way to secure customer's preferences, researchers would require statistically significant samples to be reliable, and it would be time-consuming and expensive to acquire these samples using traditional methods.